On Facebook, activist-run pages rival the reach of established, traditional media brands like MSNBC and NYT, but aren't beholden to any journalistic standard
not news http://www.nytimes.com/... @nytpolitics : What is Facebook doing to our politics? http://www.nytimes.com/... Dara Lind / @dlind : Buried gem: the pro-Trump FB page “Make America Great” literally outsources its content to the Philippineshttp://www.nytimes.com/ 2016/08/28/magazine/inside-facebooks- totally-insane-unintentionally-gigantic - hyperpartisan-political-media- machine.html?_r=0 ... Zach Toombs / @zachtoombs : Facebook is a battleground for hearts & minds in America, & right now we're letting the misinformation artists win. http://www.nytimes.com/... Mario Aguilar / @mariojoze : We'll all work for a FB-first meme factory one day http://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/IhAlSfn3Yp Oliver Darcy / @oliverdarcy : These guys have more influence than a lot of people probably want to acknowledge http://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/QkFnWNpDC6 Sean McMinn / @shmcminn : Wow: People who run these Facebook meme vomit machines make real money http://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/XXuydMGUck
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 NYT Magazine piece was the first systematic look at what had quietly become a parallel political press: activist-run Facebook pages matching MSNBC and the Times in reach while operating entirely outside journalistic norms, with operators like the pro-Trump 'Make America Great' page outsourcing content production to the Philippines for pennies per post. The coverage since reads as a four-year ledger of the consequences: Facebook acknowledging misinformation and filter bubbles in 2017, building fake-account detection against coordinated amplification, watching Mueller-indicted Russian actors exploit its Groups tools, and still facing a misinformation surge heading into the 2018 midterms.
The model proved ideology-agnostic — the left-wing Occupy Democrats page later outperformed Trump and Fox News pages using the same meme tactics — which is why the story matters beyond one election cycle. By 2020, reporting surfaced that Zuckerberg had shelved internal research on the platform's polarizing effect, meaning the distribution layer documented here was shaping politics faster than anyone inside or outside the company could constrain it.
First-order effects
- Page operators gain a revenue-bearing media business with MSNBC-scale reach and none of the editorial costs — 'Make America Great' produces content via outsourced Philippine workers rather than reporters.
- Established brands like MSNBC and the NYT find their audience metrics matched by pages optimized purely for shares, putting engagement, not accuracy, at the center of political competition.
Second-order effects
- Facebook is forced into an arms-race posture it never sought: detecting falsely amplified sentiment through fake-account patterns and hardening Groups tools after the Mueller indictment showed how easily they are exploited.
- The playbook replicates across the spectrum — Occupy Democrats proves meme-page tactics outperform even Trump and Fox News pages, so partisan entrepreneurs on every side have an incentive to fund cheap, standards-free content operations.
Third-order effects
- Political media structurally migrates from brand-governed outlets to engagement-optimized pages on a platform that sets the rules unilaterally — and with polarizing-effect research shelved internally, the incentive to fix the dynamic stays weaker than the incentive to keep the reach.
- If the pattern holds, elections become contests between professionalized misinformation supply chains and platform enforcement capacity, a gap visible again in the analysis of 250K posts and 5K political ads ahead of the midterms.
The trend: Political influence is shifting from newsroom-governed media brands to low-cost, engagement-optimized Facebook pages whose growth outpaces both journalistic standards and the platform's own moderation response.